[openbeos] Re: FalterCon 2007 Permissions - Official Response
- From: "Michael Lotz" <mmlr@xxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 13:30:58 +0200
Hello Everyone
My _very personal_ view on this topic:
When I first got those responses I was getting a bit angry, but now I'm
just a bit disappointed and sad.
A decision was made by the admin team of the project and now we get
statements like ignoring our request alltogether or doing own small
distribution. While you are free to do such a distribution from a
source license point of view, there are trademarks and copyrights
involved in the official builds that we did not give approval to use.
This is our way to express that we disagree with doing a distribution
right now.
There were votes in favor of such a CD and there were simply more votes
against it. We really try our best to make sensible decisions for Haiku
now and with the future in mind. It is not like we denied the
trademarks out of some mood. As I explained, the group simply sees the
risk of demaging our image too high right now. Heck there has not been
_any_ official release yet, we are _pre_ alpha here. And this is for a
reason. How many times did I have to read complaints about how
unfinished and unpolished Haiku is, every time it is mentioned in some
news post. It's sad enough that those people do not take the project
state into account when they judge it. But proactivly distributing
something like this is an avoidable risk that the admin team did not
want to take.
Maybe for you it doesn't make a difference whether "Bon Echo" or
"Firefox" crashes, but for me this is a very important distinction.
When I see that the product is not officially branded I am reminded
that it is not supposed to be perfectly stable or polished. And that's
where this decision most probably comes from too.
I just have a problem with the attitude here. We made a decision and
this should be accepted. Of course it may seem unpleasant for some and
cause frustration to others, but if the decision is simply undermined
by the community this causes frustration on both sides. And quite
frankly I then ask myself if having a Haiku organisation and
administration setup is the right thing. Certainly there were problems
in communication and the ball was dropped a few times where it
shouldn't have been, but we are activly working on correcting those
issues. Without the backing of the community though this is hard to
justify.
About trademarks: As Michael correctly pointed out we have an
unregistered trademark that is defined purely by our usage. Obviously
it would be nice if they were registered and fully protected. But doing
the registration costs time, money and can take a long time to get
completed. So this step was simply not yet taken.
My personal stance: Do however you please and I don't say this in
anger. I highly doubt that anyone will be teared to court because of
distributing such a CD. It simply looks disrespectful to the project
administration that after all tries to protect and shape up the brand
around the platform we are all building and hoping to use soon.
Regards
Michael
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